As ATI is subsumed into AMD, the newly combined CPU-graphics powerhouse …

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All of the required approvals have been received, so the AMD acquisition of ATI is now a done deal. In fact, ati.com now redirects to AMD. As part of its official announcement that the two have now become one, AMD also took the wraps off of "Fusion," a new project that aims to integrate the CPU and GPU on a single piece of silicon. According to AMD, Fusion will "provide the best customer experience in a world increasingly reliant upon 3D graphics."

"With the anticipated launch of Windows Vista, robust 3D graphics, digital media and device convergence are driving the need for greater performance, graphics capabilities, and battery life," said Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer. "In this increasingly diverse x86 computing environment, simply adding more CPU cores to a baseline architecture will not be enough. As x86 scales from palmtops to petaFLOPS, modular processor designs leveraging both CPU and GPU compute capabilities will be essential in meeting the requirements of computing in 2008 and beyond."

Technical details on Fusion are scant right now. According to AMD, we won't see the fruits of the project until late 2008 or 2009. We do know that Fusion will eventually show up on all of AMD's platforms, from consumer electronics and laptops to desktops and servers.

Fusion will likely appear in AMD's quad-core processors first. Earlier this month at the Microprocessor Forum, AMD talked about Barcelona, its upcoming quad-core CPU. All four cores are integrated onto a single die and share 2MB of on-die L3 cache, and Barcelona should provide a degree of die- and system-level integration that will make it very competitive with Intel's own quad-core offerings.

With Fusion, it's very likely that one of those four cores will have GPU capabilities, leaving the other three for general purpose computing. It's even possible that AMD will go with two GPU cores and two CPU cores on a single die.